When Bob Amsden learned in September that the Teamsters’ executive board had declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president, he summed up his reaction with a single word: anger.
That anger had a history. The 72-year-old retired truck driver had joined Teamsters Local 200 in Milwaukee in 1973, following in the footsteps of his father. Only several years into his retirement he learned that his pension — along with those of some 250,000 Teamsters — was threatened with cuts of up to 60%. He joined his fellow Teamsters in a movement to save their pensions, making dozens of trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with congressmen during the Trump Administration. “Republicans totally turned their backs on us,” he said. “They would give us nothing but lip service.”
A solution finally came in 2021, after President Joe Biden pushed through the American Rescue Plan, whose “Butch Lewis Act” included $36 billion to shore up the faltering pension plan. The legislation that saved Amsden’s retirement received no Republican supporters and was only able to proceed thanks to the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
For Amsden, that history made the failure to endorse Harris unforgivable. “How could you do this to a person who helped secure our futures, who saved the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of retirees?” he asked. Since the union’s decision not to endorse Harris, Amden’s frustration has been echoed by current and former Teamster members and leaders, who say the two candidates stand on opposite ends when it comes to their relationship with unions. In particular, they point to the vigorously pro-worker orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under Biden, which replaced and reversed many decisions made by the NLRB under Donald Trump that were opposed by organized labor.
“Trump has done nothing for labor, while Biden-Harris was the most pro-union administration we ever had,” said Eric Tate, the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 848 in Southern California and the executive director of the Teamsters National Black Caucus, two groups that have endorsed Harris. “I don’t understand what they’re doing [by not endorsing Harris], other than making the Teamsters become hated by other unions.”
Teamsters International President Sean O’Brien, in announcing the decision not to endorse either candidate, cited internal polls of members that showed a preference for Trump over Harris and the failure of both candidates to “make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business.” O’Brien, who has been reported to be the driving force behind the decision, also made news when he addressed the Republican Convention and praised Trump’s toughness.
Kara Deniz, a spokesperson for the Teamsters, stated in an email, “Capital & Main peddles an extreme anti-Teamsters agenda, funded by a long list of corporate-sponsored NGOs and think tanks. Why on Earth would we ever engage with you?” In July, Capital & Main published an interview with Teamster and podcaster Rick Smith, who criticized O’Brien’s decision to speak at the Republican National Convention.
O’Brien is hardly unaware of the steps the Biden-Harris administration has taken to bolster labor’s efforts at organizing. In October 2023, he praised the pro-labor rulings coming from Biden’s NLRB and contrasted the board’s approach to decisions made under Trump. He heralded a new joint employer rule issued by the National Labor Relations Board that aimed to make it more difficult for employers to shift labor responsibilities onto subcontractors as “a major blow against corporate greed.” A Trump-appointed federal judge has since overturned the rule, in response to a lawsuit by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. However, the Teamsters have continued to benefit from rulings made by Biden’s NLRB in their push to unionize the 390,000 drivers who work for Amazon subcontractors, called Delivery Service Partners.
Despite the legal setback, a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board determined in August for the first time that Southern California employees of a DSP who had unionized were joint employees of Amazon. The NLRB made a second such determination in October. The NLRB also determined that Amazon had unlawfully refused to bargain with the Teamsters, while issuing illegal threats and promises in an effort to thwart the unionization effort. A hearing in front of an NLRB judge has been scheduled for March 2025. Similar efforts by the Teamsters to organize DSP drivers for Amazon have recently gained ground in Queens, New York and Skokie, Illinois, where the Teamsters say a majority of DSP workers have signed union cards at two Amazon delivery stations.
The Teamsters have praised other National Labor Relations Board actions as well. Spurring government to crack down on companies that misclassify workers as independent contractors has been a longtime goal of the Teamsters, who say the practice is especially widespread in the trucking industry. Last June, the NLRB reversed a Trump-era rule that had made it easier to define a worker as an independent contractor. “The Teamsters Union is pleased that the NLRB has taken a critical step in putting power back into the hands of workers and reversing an egregious rule that made it easier for corporations to misclassify hardworking men and women,” O’Brien said in a statement when the rule was announced.
The National Labor Relations Board, whose members are appointed by the president, is a federal agency that makes critical rules around workplaces and is charged with protecting employees’ right to organize. Under Trump, the NLRB acted on all 10 items in a 2017 corporate wishlist from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. Many of the decisions heralded by the Teamsters last October, in fact, represented reversals of Trump-era rules.
“It was hard to be a worker under Trump, who tore apart everything that had been built,” said Jarrod Skelton, a 52-year-old Teamster member and UPS driver in Indiana who was a central region organizer for the union until 2022. Skelton noted that under Trump, the union election process was lengthened. “It gave the employer a lot more time to harass and threaten workers, and made my job a whole lot harder,” he said. In addition, he noted that the consequences for employers who engaged in illegal union-busting were minor; typically, the NLRB simply ordered a rerun of the election.
Under Biden, the National Labor Relations Board has been transformed into an agency that aggressively protects workers’ rights to organize at a time when support for unions is higher than it has been for more than half a century. Gone are the days when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saw all its wishes fulfilled. That has fueled the business group’s current major initiative, described on its website as “fighting big labor’s agenda at the NLRB.”
In one of the most consequential rulings by the National Labor Relations Board — known as the Cemex decision — employers who break the law during union campaigns can now be required to automatically recognize the union, even if the union lost the election. (Such labor law violations can include threatening and firing union supporters, and have long been used by employers to delay elections and thwart union efforts.) This ruling, which overturned nearly 50 years of precedent, followed Cemex Construction Materials Pacific’s repeated violations in resisting a Teamsters organizing drive. O’Brien praised the decision as “a catalyst for workers” across the country “who are standing up and demanding their worth.”
Cemex, which provides a muscular response to employers who break labor laws, stands in stark contrast to the vision offered by Trump this summer during an interview with Elon Musk, in which he praised the billionaire for firing striking workers. “You’re the greatest cutter…they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone,’” Trump said, eliciting laughs from Musk. (Except in rare circumstances, it is a violation of the National Labor Relations Act to fire striking workers.)
For Amsden, the Teamster retiree, Trump’s record of ignoring the pleas of Teamster retirees along with his appointment of figures within his administration who were hostile to unions has motivated him to do whatever he can to support Kamala Harris — regardless of what union leadership advises.
“When we needed them, Democrats did everything they could to keep building momentum and moving forward,” he said. “Meanwhile, not one Republican has done anything for labor in the last 20 years.”
